Web Site Hunts Pedophiles, and TV Goes Along

By ALLEN SALKIN; Happy Blitt contributed research.

Published: December 13, 2006

Last month, the Web site Perverted-Justice.com posted news of the conviction of Sean Young, a Wisconsin man sentenced to 10 years in state prison for soliciting sex online from a 14-year-old girl. According to a transcript of an online chat posted on the site, at one point Mr. Young had asked the girl, identified only as Billie, what she was wearing. When she answered ''sweats,'' Mr. Young typed back that if she were his daughter, ''i'd make u wear sexy clthes.''

Billie turned out to be an adult volunteer for Perverted Justice, an anti-pedophile group, and when Mr. Young drove to a house where he expected to meet the teenager for sex, he was arrested by sheriff's deputies.

The conviction was logged as the 104th that Perverted Justice says it has been responsible for since 2003, a tally that as of yesterday had reached 113. What started as one man's quest to rid his regional Yahoo chat room of lewd adults has grown into a nationwide force of cyberspace vigilantes, financed by a network television program hungry for ratings.

''It's a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource,'' said Robert McCrie, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

Perverted Justice is best known for putting its online volunteers at the disposal of the television newsmagazine ''Dateline NBC,'' which has broadcast 11 highly rated programs in which would-be pedophiles are lured to ''sting houses,'' only to be surprised by a camera crew and, usually, the police.

Despite that publicity, the inner workings of Perverted Justice and its reclusive founder remain largely a mystery, even as the group has emerged as one of the most effective unofficial law enforcement groups in the country, a kind of Neighborhood Watch of the Net. But the group is also criticized by some legal and law enforcement experts, who accuse it of entrapment, making mistakes that ruin innocent lives and, paradoxically, disseminating its own brand of child pornography.

Peter D. Greenspun, a lawyer who defended a rabbi from Rockville, Md., caught in a ''Dateline'' sting arranged by Perverted Justice, said that by posting online transcripts of conversations between would-be child molesters and volunteers posing as 12- and 13-year-olds, Perverted Justice was encouraging, rather than deterring, pedophiles.

''They are putting out for unfiltered, unrestricted public consumption the most graphic sexual material that they themselves say is of a perverted nature,'' Mr. Greenspun said.

Perverted Justice's founder, Xavier Von Erck, 27, a former tech-support worker, has a dedication to the cause bordering on obsession, his mother and associates said. Mr. Von Erck lives in an apartment in Portland, Ore., but rarely gives out his address, and he would not allow a reporter to visit because he feared retribution from men exposed by his group. In a telephone interview, he said he worked for his group seven days a week, mostly from a laptop in his bedroom.

''Every waking minute he's on that computer,'' said his mother, Mary Erck-Heard, 46, who raised her son after they fled his father, whom she described as alcoholic. Mr. Von Erck legally changed his name from Phillip John Eide, taking his maternal grandfather's family name, Erck, and adding the Von.

In many ways, Mr. Von Erck, who said he and his mother moved 13 times when he was in high school because they were often short of money, continues to live that messy life of deprivation. His meals often consist of ramen noodles, he said; his bed is perpetually unmade. For years, he has been trying unsuccessfully to find his father, who, he says, still owes his mother child support.

''I have a low opinion of men in general,'' he said. ''The most heinous crimes in our society are committed by males.''

Perverted Justice has 41,000 registered users of its online forums dedicated to the cause of stopping predators, 65 volunteers trained as chat room decoys and three salaried leaders: Mr. Von Erck, a woman who is a liaison with law enforcement and a business manager.

Typically, a Perverted Justice volunteer creates a false online profile, posing as, say, a 13-year-old girl on MySpace. The volunteer will wait to receive e-mail messages or will enter a chat room. If an adult contacts the volunteer, the decoy responds and sees if the conversation becomes sexual.

The group's collaboration with ''Dateline'' since 2004 has been lucrative. A person familiar with Perverted Justice's finances who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the matter publicly said NBC was paying the group roughly $70,000 for each hour of television produced.

''They do a lot a work for us, and they deserve to be reimbursed for that work,'' said David Corvo, the executive producer of ''Dateline,'' who met with Mr. Von Erck earlier this year in New York to discuss their collaboration.

Mr. Von Erck said the NBC money had been used in part to buy computer servers that would not be overwhelmed every time the group was mentioned on television.